Lyman P. Van Slyke—known as “Van” to his friends and colleagues— grew up in a small mining town in northern Minnesota and graduated from Carleton College in 1950. He enlisted in the U.S. Navy and was assigned as a naval air intelligence officer on the aircraft carrier Valley Forge during the Korean War. When his […]
Sarah Mellors Rodriguez is Assistant Professor of History at Missouri State University and author of Reproductive Realities in Modern China: Birth Control and Abortion, 1911-2021 (Cambridge University Press, 2023). Many readers will be familiar with the politics of reproduction in contemporary China, via media stories about the One Child Policy in effect from the late […]
Scholars of Chinese art history now have a new home to share news, events, and find their communities! The Association for Chinese Art History (ACAH) is a newly-formed committee of AAS, associated with the East and Inner Asia Council (EIAC). It seeks to promote communication and community among scholars of Chinese art and architectural history […]
As the Qing dynasty wrested control over the Chinese empire from Ming rulers in the mid-1600s, officials in Beijing needed information. Administering a state both geographically large and bureaucratically deep, the central government relied on reports from below to ascertain events outside the capital city and assess the performance of officials who operated beyond its […]
When historian and lifetime AAS member Terry Lautz arrived in mainland China for the first time in December 1978, he visited a country that had been slowly mending ties with the United States after a rift of more than two decades. By the time he departed the mainland three weeks later, Sino-American relations had undergone […]
On March 12, 1973, John T. “Jack” Downey walked across the Lo Wu Bridge from mainland China into Hong Kong—a crossing more than two decades in the making. In November 1952, Downey had been a young CIA agent tasked with a covert mission near the border between China and Korea. Chinese forces, however, had prior […]
Dr. Chang Hao, the renowned Sinologist and scholar devoted to the intellectual history of modern China, died April 21 at age 85 in Albany, California. Dr. Chang was born in 1937 in Xiamen, and after living in Chongqing and Nanjing he moved with his family to Taiwan in 1949. He studied with well-known China scholars […]
Silvia Lindtner is Associate Professor in the School of Information and Director of the Center for Ethics, Society, and Computing at the University of Michigan and author of Prototype Nation: China and the Contested Promise of Innovation, published by Princeton University Press and winner of the 2022 AAS Joseph Levenson Prize (Post-1900). To begin with, […]
Charlotte Furth, Professor Emerita of Chinese history at the University of Southern California, died on June 19, 2022, in Los Angeles, California, at the age of 88. Furth received her B.A. in French from the University of North Carolina and her Ph.D. in Chinese history from Stanford University. Her early work was in the intellectual […]
The Bei Shan Tang Foundation 北山堂基金 of Hong Kong has generously pledged financial support to work cooperatively with the AAS to create two exciting initiatives in the field of Chinese art history: The establishment of awards to recognize and celebrate distinguished new monographs and catalogues in Chinese art history (see more information via the button below), […]
Wai-yee Li is 1879 Professor of Chinese Literature at Harvard University. She translated and edited Plum Shadows and Plank Bridge: Two Memoirs about Courtesans, by Mao Xiang and Yu Huai, published by Columbia University Press and winner of the 2022 AAS Patrick D. Hanan Book Prize for Translation. To begin with, please tell us what […]
By Maura Elizabeth Cunningham Discussions of how to address climate change frequently note that one of the most important factors will be breaking China’s “addiction” to coal. Coal-fired power plants have provided electricity to the country’s manufacturing sector and growing cities for decades, while at the same time creating toxic air pollution and carbon dioxide […]
AAS Board of Directors March 29, 2022 The AAS is aware that some scholars located in the PRC were pressured into withdrawing from their scheduled online presentations at the recently concluded 2022 Annual Conference. We are currently working to determine the number of individuals involved and the scope of actions affecting conference participants. The AAS firmly supports […]
Jean C. Oi will take office as the next AAS Vice President following the 2022 Annual Conference in March. Oi is William Haas Professor of Chinese Politics, Department of Political Science and Senior Fellow, Freeman Spogli Institute of International Studies, Director of the China Program at Stanford University and Lee Shau Kee Director of the Stanford Center […]
Christopher Lupke is Professor of Chinese Cultural Studies at the University of Alberta and has been an AAS member for 32 years, since 1989. Lupke’s research interests cover literary and cultural studies, including film studies, in China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and the Sinophone World. Why did you join AAS and why would you recommend AAS […]
Since early 2020, Christopher Rea, a professor of Chinese at the University of British Columbia, has translated over twenty early Chinese films and made them available on the YouTube channel Modern Chinese Cultural Studies. He has also produced a semester-long online course on early Chinese cinema, available at chinesefilmclassics.org. In June 2021, Columbia University Press […]
By Jing Jiang Jing Jiang is Associate Professor of Chinese and Humanities at Reed College and author of Found in Translation: “New People” in Twentieth-Century Chinese Science Fiction, the latest Asia Shorts title released by AAS Publications. Chinese science fiction (SF) has flourished in the last ten years. Writers who had been toiling quietly in […]
Michael O’Sullivan is a Junior Research Fellow in the Center for History and Economics at Harvard University and author of “Vernacular Capitalism and Intellectual History in a Gujarati Account of China, 1860–68,” which appears in the May 2021 issue of the Journal of Asian Studies. O’Sullivan’s article discusses a travelogue published in 1868 by Damodar […]
AAS Publications has recently released the latest title in its Asia Past & Present monograph series. In The Fifty Years That Changed Chinese Religion, 1898–1948, Paul R. Katz (Academia Sinica) and Vincent Goossaert (EPHE, PSL [Paris]) examine a time of significant political and social upheaval in China and demonstrate how religious life was also transformed […]
Macabe Keliher is Assistant Professor in the Clements Department of History at Southern Methodist University and author of The Board of Rites and the Making of Qing China, published by University of California Press, which won the 2021 AAS Joseph Levenson Pre-1900 Book Prize honorable mention. To begin with, please tell us what your book […]
